The Arcades Project

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by Walter Benjamin,

Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin

Harvard University Press

Due/Published December 1999, 960 pages, cloth

ISBN 067404326X

Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas." Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the shift to the modern age. 46 halftones

The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

"Benjamin's work is the most advanced, most complex, and most comprehensive study of the dominant motifs and unresolved tendencies of the nineteenth century that continue to be of critical importance for us today. No other study has measured up to its methodological inventiveness, or so exemplarily met its demand that history writing be reinvented for every topic and on every occasion." -Werner Hamacher

"Knowledge of The Arcades Project is essential for a full comprehension of Benjamin's intentions and achievement in the 1930s--especially his highly original and influential attempt to define the idea of the modern." -Michael W. Jennings, author of Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism

"Quite simply, the Passagen-Werk is one of the twentieth century's great efforts at historical comprehension--some would say the greatest." -T. J. Clark

"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives."